Domain Squatting Examples / Using Compete To Spy (14)
Allright then 
Heres another little 007 super secret spying example.
Just using free tools available online, I will show you how I discovered the campaigns the domain squatters are running.
And although they are being sued by Facebook, at the moment many of these campaigns are still live.
Now before I continue...
If you havent read the post Polarbacon put up the other day, I urge you to head over here and check it out.
So think twice before you try and do this yourself cause facebook are on the warpath at the moment.
My damaging admission
I have to be honest though.
I didnt set out to find these sites, and kind of just stumbled upon them.
For a while I have been meaning to check out compete.com to see whether the data they offer could assist with building profitable campaigns faster.
One of the key features I am after is their 'referrer tracking' and applying that to top performing offers to see where the traffic is coming from.
My discovery
This led me to check out the demo they have running for facebook.
So scanning through the reports, I ended up on the Traffic Details tab looking at new referrers to facebook in June, sorted by the number of referrals:
I underlined some of the more obvious domains, but specifically the one at the top interested me.
885k referrals to facebook in a month out of nowhere.
And looking at the traffic stats, socialrewardpanel.com had over 3m unique visitors in June!
Time to dig deeper
And thus I used my standard tricks to find out more about this domain.
1) visit the actual domain
no luck - nothing there
2) do a site: search to see what else is indexed by google
no luck - just the homepage
3) do a normal google search to see whether people are commenting about this site
bingo!
this is clearly an affiliate campaign looking at the complaints
so I started scanning through the result for a URL that actually would give me a landing page.
http://videorewardcentral.com/?sov=125082
http://secredir.com/?sov=fedburner.com
http://httparchive.org/viewsite.php?pageid=269198
Tracking source found
Looking through all that data, two domains kept showing up:
http://www.1939.com/
http://secredir.com/
At the moment I dont have a compete subscription so I could not use compete to analyze those two domains.
So over to alexa:
1939.com has a global rank of 1,312 (wow)
secredir.com has a global rank of 25,035
So I started digging into 1939.com further.
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/1939.com#
Conclusion
1939.com is an interesting mix between a url shortener and a landing page rotator.
it is heavily used by domain typo squaters
In June it had 5m unique visitors
To buy this from Lead Impact would cost you about 75k a month.
Its monitized with email + mobile phone submit followed by a bunch of offers
This would generate $2.5 million per month If 10% of traffic converted with average per user payout of $5.
50% of those according to alexa came previously from "www.faceboook.com" keyword search and similar domain typos.
Here are some of the results:
which goes here:
http://giveaway-search.com/?sov=123454
and
which goes to a dead domain
How can you use this?
Check the downstream sites.
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/1939.com#
And just pop your own offer over those domains
Have fun
i couldnt show this earlier cause my adwords was not working
this is why domain typo squatting is lucrative:
Wow! That's some heavy duty traffic action. Just a small percentage of that could turn over some very nice coin.
So I'm assuming if someone wanted to buy a domain to trick people when they mistype a word, they MUST have .com? Because I doubt anyone could lets say rank for Googlemobile.org or anything similar like that in google search results so you'd actually have to have googlemobile.com and try to stay under the radar?
Since after searching a bit about this I found yahooweather.net to be available. Gets around 200k exact match searches or something but as a SEO it would be impossible to rank for and who will type that in their browser?
Originally Posted by vidivo
Jan is a good friend.. founded elephant orchestra and then elephant traffic.. if you go his way tell him maroulis sent you and he'll take care of you
let me know if I can help in any way
Originally Posted by vidivo
Yes you can "save yourself the hassle and work with elephant traffic" but i suggest buying and researching your own domains. Elephant traffic has a ton of domain inventory to sell to advertisers like you and I but we both know they keep that secret sauce for themselves and work direct much like the PPV networks do when they "discover" something that works "too good".
The three most common types of single-letter typing mistakes are:
o inclusion of an extra letter (29%)
o inclusion of an incorrect letter (23%)
o omission of a letter (20%)
The three most common TLD registrations among the TLDs we surveyed are:
o dot-COM (70%)
o dot-NET (13%)
o dot-ORG (9%)
Wrong TLD – refers to those users who enter the wrong top-level domain (TLD), such as dot-COM instead of dot-ORG.
Wrong Letter – refers to those users who type a wrong letter, such as myspsce.com
Repeated Letter – refers to those users who repeat a letter, such as faceboook.com
Extra Letter – similar to repeated letter, except that the incorrect letter (or number) is not repeated, but typically within one key of the correct letter that precedes or follows it within the domain
Missing Letter – refers to those users who dropped a character from the domain name, such as myspac.com
Missing dot – refers to dropping a dot (“.”) in the domain name, such as wwwmyspace.com
Letter Swap – refers to transposing two letters, such as wellfsargo.com
Extra Character – includes the typos that incorrectly contain an extra non-letter character, such as adding a hyphen in biz-rate.com
^ typically, a .net will have 5% of the traffic of the .com the .org is a very special case..
the highest traffic typos are phonetic typos (facebok.com, tweeter.com, etc.) .... also wwwprefix.com receive plenty of traffic if the domain has a decent alexa rank..
as for elephant traffic their biz model is very simple.. Jan is a domainer himself.. buy domains, optimize keywords, park domains... then figure out how u can sell excess inventory for highest RPM through your own platform as opposed to relying on domainsponsor, sedo, skenzo, etc which rely on ask/yahoo/google feeds and take a cut themselves
Very useful information, thanks.
I didn't know about the referrer information in Compete.com, nice!
Would love to see a case study on using Elephant traffic. Will definitely look into using the info to create some campaigns. Thanks!
The funny thing is, the landing page is exact the same which has been shared a couple of months ago in another more or less private forum. That guy(s) just changed the css. The user will be asked to answer 3 very simple questions. This creates momentum and the user should quickly go through the submission forms.
At least thats the theory, it worked with other traffic but have not tried this on ppv as i was not into that that before. According to that volume it definietly works...
So can I conclude that, these people monetize through domain typo, and when visitors go in the website, they will be redirected through 1939.com shorterner and move to their own CPA offer?
I performed a search in google for "Googole" "gooogle", "facebok"... apparently these giant are already protecting their traffic being driven away by domain typo. Because the results shown is their own page instead of the "typo domain".
Lastly, can i conclude that this domain typo SEO is lucrative, but do not aim after those giants because google can take you down easily?
I played around with this traffic through elephant traffic last fall for facebook and youtube. Was quite lucrative for a while before it got competitive. Got a little scared and gave it up after maxbounty got sued by facebook. Initially was paying around .05 cents a click for but it soon shot up to .10 or 11. cents. Whoever owns those domains was killing it. I don't think Elephant Traffic has so much of that typo traffic anymore though.
The main problem with Elephant Traffic is that anyone can copy the campaign. When people first started running they they were just running email submits. Then they started using co reg paths. I think now some of them capturing and monetizing the email themselves before passing it down a co reg path.
I would be very careful running that type of traffic now. Facebook did eventually go after people for it
http://www.elliotsblog.com/facebook-...g-lawsuit-8377
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